The concept of remote confinement, often referred to as home arrest, is an alternative to institutional incarceration of prisoners and an aid to probation. It has developed in recent years to relieve the overcrowding of jails and to provide a more preferred method of punishment and rehabilitation for those convicted of criminal offenses of a nonviolent or lesser type.
The background of the remote confinement concept is generally supported in the above incorporated parent application Ser. No. 041,698.
Remote confinement systems have as one of their primary goals the monitoring of the presence of an assigned prisoner at his home or such remote location to which he is assigned for confinement. The purpose of the monitoring is to insure, by information reported to a central office, that the assigned prisoner has remained or is confined in accordance with the terms of his home arrest sentence. Two general categories of presence monitoring have been proposed. Continuous monitoring has been proposed in order to determine any departure of the prisoner from the remote confinement location. Such systems employ remote monitoring units which detect prisoner departures from the remote location and then to communicate information to a central office to notify a supervising entity of violations. Such continuous monitoring is usually provided by the attachment to the assigned prisoner of a transmitter which generates at shortly spaced intervals a signal to a home receiver unit permanently installed at the place of remote confinement, such as at the prisoner's home, to verify that the transmitter is in proximity to the home. Such devices provide an advantage in that the signals will be generated from the transmitter less dependent on the willingness or ability of the prisoner to cooperate, and accordingly, the presence of the prisoner can with such devices be monitored throughout the day and night and whether the prisoner is awake or asleep.
Scheduled testing of the presence of a prisoner at the remote location is, however, more practical where tests are employed requiring in part the cooperation of the prisoner. Such concepts may include prisoner identification by the delivery of a voice sample at the remote location. They may also include prisoner testing by providing the performance of a test upon or by the prisoner. In home confinement systems used in combination with behavioral testing such as breath alcohol testing as described in accordance with the teachings of parent application Ser. No. 041,698, the voice identity test, performed in combination, will provide a highly reliable method of verifying the identity of the person delivering a breath sample. As a mere indication of the presence of the prisoner at the remote location, voice tests or other scheduled tests requiring the cooperation of the prisoner are less suited for use during periods when the prisoner is asleep.
Furthermore, neither type of system, either the continuous or the scheduled testing type, provide constraint upon the prisoner which is adequate or appropriate in many cases. Accordingly, there exists a need to provide for alternative types of prisoner monitoring without unduly restricting the flexibility or compromising the economy of the system.
Furthermore, the use of RF transmitters physically attached to the prisoner has in the prior art required replacement of the transmitters or the assignment of transmitters after the home unit has been installed in the prisoner's home. As a result, provision has been made for verifying the identity of the specific transmitter by code reading means included in the home unit. Such means have, however, required a service call to the home unit to match the code of the unit with a number of the new transmitter. Since that number is usually unknown, and different than a number known, at the time of the home unit's installation. Accordingly, if the system were to require that the home unit validate the transmission before initiating a call to the central office, a service call is required to set the receiver to recognize the transmitter code. Otherwise, every transmitter signal would have to be transmitted to the central office for identification of the transmitter. This would burden the central unit of the system. The need for such service calls from a probation office to the confinement location, as well as the repeated transmission of information to the central office, unnecessarily add to the cost of operation of the home confinement system.
The provision of home units which are capable of monitoring events associated with the monitoring and testing of the prisoner have required the use of home units particularly equipped for specific types of monitoring. In situations, however, where the particular terms of confinement of a specific prisoner are different from those of other prisoners on the same confinement system, the need to supervise multiple individual home units which perform only certain tests appropriate for the particular prisoner have been required. This also involves the need for service calls to the home unit, or to the setting of the home unit before installation so that it will respond to only the test appropriate for the particular prisoner. However, where it becomes necessary to alter the test after the home unit is installed, or to change the nature or scheduling of the tests throughout the day such units of the prior art have lacked flexibility. Accordingly, there is a need to improve the flexibility of remote confinement systems.
In home confinement systems of the prior art, information has been communicated between the remote location and the central location. Each of these communications occupies a certain amount of time. Such communications of the prior art have included reporting of various events which may or may not contain information concerning the presence of the prisoner or his conduct. The reporting of the events has in the prior art included transmissions of signals which falsely report the presence or absence of a prisoner or the presence or absence of a proper response or result from a test. Furthermore, the reporting of information from the home unit to the central office consumes online time which expands the cost of central office equipment necessary to service a particular number of prisoners. Accordingly, there is a need to relieve the demand per confined prisoner on the central unit and to thereby increase the capacity of remote confinement systems to service more prisoners.